appeal, unfortunately, to but a small section of the community. We want more social clubs; we want free concerts, elevating although popular in character; we want places where young men and women can meet socially, apart from the public-houses, and yet where they have full liberty to enjoy themselves without licence. We want, indeed, in every town people’s palaces, where people can be thoroughly at home, and where they can spend a social evening pleasantly and rationally.[13] On similar lines the provision of an adequate number of allotments in the neighbourhood of towns would undoubtedly do much towards reducing the betting evil. Experience shows that the proportion of working men who would find in gardening an absorbing interest is very considerable, yet in most towns the supply of allotments is entirely inadequate. Considered either as counter-attractions to the public-house and the bookmaker, or as a benefit to the cultivators in point both of profit and of health, there is no doubt that it would amply repay municipalities to provide allotments far more liberally than is done at present. It is clear, then, that the provision of better housing for the working classes would tend to decrease the betting evil. Men who have a house of which they are proud and a garden to cultivate, in which they may keep poultry, rabbits, or pigeons, are much less likely to indulge in betting than the inhabitants of an overcrowded town district, with small means of spending their leisure. Nor will villages produced by the decentralising of the towns suffer from the monotony of life that at present afflicts many agricultural districts. Rapid transit will enable them to share in the interests of the life of the adjacent towns. The connection between the housing problem and the betting evil well illustrates our position that betting is, to a large extent, a symptom of a social disease, and that if we would be successful in eradicating the symptom, we must seek to remedy the disease. The provision of a more adequate education for the children of the poor would tend in this direction. By teaching the children to read we make it easy for them to follow the betting news in the newspapers and to keep their betting-books, yet we take them from school before the thirst for knowledge has really been awakened. Better education is especially needed in the case of girls, who will be the mothers of the future. If their mental horizon is limited, they cannot awaken in their children interest in those various branches of knowledge which provide, in the case of those who are better educated, the mental landscape which enriches their lives. All such movements, therefore, as the Home Reading Union, or anything which tends to the better education of the people, will tend at the same time to decrease the monotony of life, and lessen the temptation to resort to demoralising excitements.